Software has bugs

Disappointment occurs when expectations don’t match reality. And our expectations for software quality are profoundly unrealistic. Thus, lots of people are continuously disappointed — even enraged — by software bugs. They shouldn’t be.

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This is not a call to give up on software quality, quite the contrary. This is a call to remove the highly charged emotional responses of encountering the world as it should be expected to spin. Demeaning developers, questioning their professionalism (whatever that means!), or feigning outrage at that which ails all software makes everyone, including users, worse off.

So next time you hit an annoying bug, give it five minutes before you fire off that indignant tweet. Marvel at the miracle it is that anything as complex as a modern piece of software works at all! Consider the billions of instructions our work-horse CPUs have to get just right for you to enjoy the splendors of computing. Have some sympathy for man and machine.

I am Brandon Keepers, and I work at GitHub on making Open Source more approachable, effective, and ubiquitous. I tend to think like an engineer, work like an artist, dream like an astronaut, love like a human, and sleep like a baby.